To Witness Submission in Human Conditions: A Gendered Redefining of Levinas’ Responsibility in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight.

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas presents the human condition as fundamentally shaped by responsibility (Morgan 114). In this, we are born with a “debt contracted before any freedom and […] consciousness,” paid off in an endless passivity to the needs of those around us (Morgan 125–29). While he frames this as a universal philosophy, extending beyond social structures and institutions towards an abstract ‘meaning’ (Morgan, 130), he articulates submission using gendered language:—‘Eros, the feminine, modesty, the caress’ (Morgan 125). This has since been the target of gendered critiques by feminist philosophers such as Irigaray, who maintains that “Levinas considers sexual difference as secondary to ethics, [establishing] paternity as the paradigm of self-transcendence” (Vasseleu 110). Thus, the seemingly “universal” state of Levinas’ ethics highlights an important overgeneralization: submission is more readily described as feminine because it disproportionately applies to women’s experiences compared with men. Under these sexual assumptions, I wish to defend the notion that Levinas’ philosophical framework unknowingly functions on the “effacement of the feminine” before the establishment of social and ethical relations (Vasseleu 111).

Accordingly, this essay argues that ‘Levinasian’ responsibility is not an entirely universal human condition but rather a distinctly feminine way of being. To demonstrate this, I examine Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight, where the female protagonists are so deeply constrained to ‘passive’ responsibility that they come to see themselves as sexual and social objects. This self-objectification then mutates in various ways—through imagined futures, ‘dark’ female counterparts, and a painfully embedded subordination, they become reduced to spectators of their own lived experiences. Reframing Levinasian responsibility as extreme feminine passivity, I contend that these women are burdened with the role of observer in order to live ‘meaningfully’. Consequently, the ‘feminine’ drive toward death in these texts is not simply suicidal, but a rejection of the masculine demands that dictate a woman’s world.